It had been a slow morning. Jake had expected it the night before, going to bed so late compared to his usual schedule, but he still found it hellish to wake up when he heard his alarm ring out early in the morning.
Last night had been a real “Rock and a Hard Place” situation, staying up to celebrate New Year's with his family while knowing an early morning start awaited him. He’d considered canceling the morning wakeup call, or delaying it, but decided against it while tossing and turning in bed late at night. He’d recently started his new routine: he didn’t want to break habit over something as stupid as a bad night’s rest. In the end, this internal debate over the early morning alarm had only caused him to stress out, keeping up a good hour after he’d tried to fall asleep.
Now, standing bleary-eyed leaning against his counter to support him, Jake was delaying leaving the house for as long as possible. He was chewing sluggishly on the last overripened banana he’d found on the counter.
As he chewed the last few bites, he reached behind him and cracked his neck trying to shake the early morning stiffness out of himself. Glancing out the window as he tossed the peel of his breakfast into the open bin next to the counter, he saw pinpricks of light shining through as the sun rose. He was confident he was the only one up at this hour: the rest of his family would still be sleeping in, enjoying the benefits of not going for an early morning run.
With one last stretch of the neck and a bemused sigh, as he thought about how cold it would be outside, Jake made his way for the front door. He felt his phone in his right pocket, and walking by a small end table in the entry hall quickly grabbed his keys and wallet. He didn’t need the wallet, he wasn’t planning on driving or buying anything, but he still felt more comfortable pairing it with his keys rather than leaving it behind. He wore a simple black T-shirt with a faded design no one could recognize, and a pair of red exercise shorts he’d had since middle school. His growth had stunted, much to his displeasure, so though the shorts were old they still fit him fine, just a bit higher above his knees now, with plenty of room in his pockets for the wallet-key combo.
Walking carefully across the squeaky hardwood of the entryway in an attempt to stay as quiet as possible, Jake unlocked and opened the front door to sneak out the house without waking anyone up, only to be interrupted by the high-pitched shrill of the burglar alarm which pierced through the house. In his focus to sneak quietly through the entry hall, the tired, hazy hog that enveloped his brain had overlooked that the burglar alarm was still active.
As Jake panicked and tried to quickly reach over to the wall-mounted security panel to input the code and shut off the shrill sound echoing through the house, he stumbled over himself in his panic slipping into a semi-split sprawled out across the hardwood floor. He had never been the most coordinated of guys. By the time he’d managed to compose himself and reach the security panel, it was too late. The alarm had shut off. This was bad. This meant one of three things: He had woken his parents, sisters, or both. Someone in this cloud of people had shut off the alarm, and soon they would come storming out here to see who had set the alarm off.
None of these people, not his sisters or his parents, would be happy to see him standing there at the ass crack of dawn, and though he couldn’t blame them he didn’t feel like facing their tired fury right before his run. So, he did the only thing he could think to do.
Going out the front door, and locking it behind him, he sent a quick text to the family group chat before starting his run. “Sorry about the alarm. See you in a bit.” That should quell… whoever he woke up till he got back. His coward’s solution in play, he hurried down the driveway and started his run through the neighborhood.
Jake had never been a lean guy, always leaning towards the portlier side, but it had gotten worse the last few months. He didn’t know what it was exactly, a new medication or a change in his diet, but he’d been gaining weight rapidly. The final straw had been a regular doctor’s checkup though. His cholesterol was double what it should be for a twenty-two-year-old, and the doctor had spent half the time subtly recommending diet plans. Jake had gotten the hint and had spent the last three weeks cutting back his caloric intake and exercise.
Jake had gotten used to the reduced food and diet changes quickly and found he enjoyed exercising. Mostly. He was still struggling with cardio. He was hoping to get a decent exercise and diet plan figured out before returning to college from winter break, and cardio was throwing a consistent wrench in his plans. So, for the past week or so he had begun doing morning runs to try and help this.
If he was honest with himself, he hated running and didn’t even know for sure if it was helping or not. He heard online from some random source it was helpful, but googling exercise and diet tips and then trying to sort through what came up for what was beneficial was an exhausting process. What he did know was that despite how much he hated it, he felt like he was gradually improving. Or it was all in his head, the placebo effect and all. That nagging doubt always seemed to worm its way into his head when he reviewed the effects his diet and exercise were having.
Today it had been around fifteen minutes of straight running before Jake decided he’d earned a water break. He was trying to limit his water breaks to 2-3 an hour of running, but so far, he had only succeeded in running for a full hour once. He had promptly thrown up after finishing, but he didn’t like to focus on that. He was gasping for water, but when he went reaching for his water bottle found nothing. He usually jammed a plastic water bottle into his pocket with his phone early in the morning. It wasn’t the most comfortable, but he found he preferred it to carrying it. Only today, there was nothing.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
With a sigh, Jake realized he’d forgotten his water on the kitchen counter. Useless phone and wallet? Check and Check. Water? Not a drop. He wasn’t looking forward to heading home so soon (He wanted to give it a bit longer to let his family members fall back asleep) but there wasn’t anything for it. There weren’t any public water fountains nearby and Jake felt like he was dying of thirst.
As the sun crest the sky in front of him, rising into the air, Jake turned around to begin marching home. As he was turning to walk, however, he found himself stumbling backward. He reached back in a panic to stop himself from meeting the pavement below. Instead, what his hand found was the rough grit of sand.
Stumbling backward, Jake found himself suddenly rolling down a substantially tall dune, screaming out a surprise. This was a mistake, as all screaming out did was lead him to swallow mouthfuls of sand. Once he’d finished tumbling over, he found himself landing in a surprisingly soft cushion of girted sand. It felt rough and coarse across his body, yet he didn’t feel any broken bones or even major bruises from the substantial tumble he had just taken.
Coughing and spitting, struggling to get the sand out of his mouth, he recoiled at the sudden metallic taste that enveloped his mouth, reminding him of old pennies. Looking around in a confused daze, he couldn’t see anything for miles. Just dune after dune of brownish sand that seemed to stick to his skin. He was panicking now and confused as to what the hell was going on. He didn’t know if he’d been drugged this morning or if he’d slammed his head against the concrete when he was falling early and was trapped in some bizarre comma, but he couldn’t see any trace of his neighborhood around him. The only sign of any life at all was the disturbed sand trails he created when falling backward.
He struggled to pull himself up, still gagging at the copper-tasting sand that invaded his mouth, refusing to lead his throat no matter how hard he struggled and gagged himself. A sense of panic was welling up inside Jake, but he was doing his best to try and keep it under control. He always believed that panicking failed to solve anything, it just wasted time. Though this situation was far more extreme than panic over finals or group projects, he was struggling to apply the same philosophy here. Panic would accomplish nothing; it would simply waste his time. Given that he didn’t understand where he was or how he got there, he couldn’t afford to panic. Not yet.
He felt his pockets, and amidst a sea of copper sand he’d managed to collect during his fall, he managed to hold onto his phone, keys, and wallet. Taking his phone out, he was not surprised to find he no longer had any reception (SOS or otherwise). Wherever the hell he was, it was far outside any cell provider. Curiously, he opened the phone and scrolled through, looking for a random app or photo he didn’t remember. At last, he found it, an old app he had only vague memories of downloading and playing. Opening the app, he was able to clearly and perfectly read the company's error message that appeared, telling him to connect to Wi-Fi.
For the time being, this was the best proof he had that he wasn’t stuck in a dream. From what he remembered it was impossible to read unfamiliar text in a dream, but here it was perfectly displayed and legible. He couldn’t call it one hundred percent certainty, as he didn’t remember the exact science behind it and was also sort of relying on some information he remembered from movies and an episode of Batman the Animated Series, but for now, he was leaning towards reality as opposed to dream.
Putting the phone away and looking around, Jake was able to spot, in the far-off distance, a blur jutting out amongst the ever-stretching dunes. There was nothing else he could make out on the horizon, and the blur seemed to be stationary and non-living. With careful precision so as not to lose his shoes or socks in the buried sand, Jake began marching his way toward the blur in the distance. It was slow going the entire way, he had hopped as he walked, he would find patches of more stable ground to walk on, but no he continually sunk into the sand with every step.
Worse, the longer he walked the clearer it became that he had arrived here early in the morning, with the sun barely in the sky. As his journey continued, and the time stretched on, the sun rose further and further into the sky, as if to mock him and make his journey more difficult. As he continued to walk in the scorching heat cast by the sun, struggling to breathe through his dust-coated throat, every step felt torturous. Yet he was making undeniable progress.
As the time stretched on, and the distance he traveled grew exponentially, the details of what he was traveling towards began to take shape. The edges of the blur sharpened into those of a jagged rock, jutting out from the ground. When he was, what he assumed to be, five hundred meters from the rock he could see it was mostly a teal-greenish color, and assumed it was copper ore based on the unending taste assaulting his mouth for the past few hours of his march. Along with that, he could see an alcove carved into the copper deposit, large enough for him to crawl into and rest comfortably.
When he had at last finished his trek and reached the alcove in the copper deposit, it was with great difficulty he heaved his exhausted body into the hollow chamber in the rock. He had enough room to sprawl out and lay down, but he had no interest in doing that. Instead, he simply curled up into a ball, pulling his legs tight to himself and burying his face into his knees. Whatever panic he’d been managing to suppress so far burst forth all at once as he began hyperventilating, struggling to control his breathing or think rationing. Amongst this, as he found himself diving headfirst into a panic attack he began trying to sob into his leg.
However, already thirsty before falling into the desert and facing a multi-hour hike through the desert, he found himself severely dehydrated. All that came out were dry sobs of anguish, echoing off his knees and reverberating around the rocky hollow he found himself in.